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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

I have been a PHP programmer since long and while I do wish to go up for Django or RoR but I usually get put off by the amount of time I need to spend getting around both. On the other hand, it is so easy to get started with any PHP framework (except Zend, of course) and thats what I love, easiness to get encouraging productive output but seeing the people's prejudice, I feel that I would have to more or less go up for them.

I hate the fact how difficult is to associate yourself as "good PHP developer" amongst clueless 3$/hr script kiddies but if you are able to call yourself as a Django developer, you are automatically in the category of a good programmer.

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Learn Python and/or Ruby. Not for the salary bracket it will put you into, but for the horizons it will broaden in terms of how you understand programming.

Don't learn Django or RoR either. You'll just be solving the same problem in a different way. Intead, try something entirely new--write a chat or job server with Twisted, try your hand at image processing, write some ML classifiers, and so forth. It's not as hard or out of reach as you'd think. Imagine a fun problem to solve--something you've always wanted your computer to do (perhaps something that irks you, that you want to automate) and just do it!

You'll find yourself in that "other category" without that having been your objective at all, and you'll have much more to show for it.

The problem with a low barrier to entry is that there is less filtering, so you get very bad programmers claiming to be experienced developers. However a good programmer can surely use PHP constructs (that are not so much different than the ones offered by other languages at the same level of abstraction) to provide modular and easy to manage code. If the customer wants the cheap developer, she or he will later learn that there is a real difference, and next time will be willing to pay more, as it is actually a way to pay less in the long run...

I spent some time learning Python and Django to some degree. Python is easy and I wish I could write more in it. Django felt less awesome, but still pretty good, except when it came to deploying it on my web hosting (Dreamhost). At the time, they only sort of supported it.

But I always fall back on PHP. I know it - it works, warts and all. It's maybe not a great scripting language, but it's a good one and it has the advantage of being almost ubiquitous.

> I do wish to go up for Django or RoR but I usually get put off by the amount of time I need to spend getting around both

Is this a joke?

If not I think it heavily reinforces my view of PHP developers and clueless & lazy.

Why clueless and lazy? We know the strengths and weaknesses of PHP and other programming languages. Thing is, while we really do appreciate what others offer it's still easier / cheaper / better (choose whichever sounds good to you) to "import" good ideas from <insert language> than to change whole stack.

Clueless and lazy because the amount of time to "get your head around" django and python is so absurdly minimal for anyone who has done any web development at all. It is incredibly straightforward, and finding that "too much" pretty much disqualifies someone from being a competent developer.

I don't wish to take it personally but these kind of remarks make me furious. Should I build you something in Django if thats what it takes to show you? because I am sure I will. By getting my head around, I didn't necessarily meant I was too foolish to understand anything but I had my problems. There wasnt any default schema for urls, each route needed a new one, managing database and creating tables required a console based code generator, setting up django with apache required an effort, the abstraction of app vs website was quite peculiar, and some other issues I don't recall. Call it my ignorance, stupidity, daftness that I failed at so basic stuff but thats my side of the story.

App vs website is bizarre the first time you encounter it - in my mind it would have been better them calling "projects" "deployments". The first time I worked with django I developed my application/project inside-out.

But the second time, I didn't.

> Should I build you something in Django if thats what it takes to show you?

What the hell does it matter what I think?

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